Kari Lake asks Arizona court to throw out results of gubernatorial election she lost to Katie Hobbs

Kari Lake has filed a lawsuit challenging the results of the Arizona gubernatorial election and is seeking an injunction declaring her the winner.

The 70-page lawsuit filed Friday seeks an order declaring Lake the winner of Arizona’s 2022 gubernatorial election or, alternatively, to throw out the results and require the state’s Maricopa County to hold a new election.

Lake has refused to acknowledge that she lost to Katie Hobbs by more than 17,000 votes.

The lawsuit filed in Maricopa County Superior Court focuses on the long lines and other difficulties people experienced while voting on Election Day in Maricopa County. It also alleges that hundreds of thousands of votes were cast illegally, but there is no evidence that this is true.

Lake was one of the highest-profile Republican candidates in the midterms to come to terms with former President Donald Trump’s false claims of voter fraud in 2020.

Katie Hobbs (pictured) in a post on her Twitter account called the lawsuit “Lake’s last desperate attempt to undermine our democracy and undo the will of the voters.”

The Donald Trump-backed gubernatorial candidate has bombarded Maricopa County with complaints, largely related to a problem with printers at some polling places that caused ballots to be printed with markings that were too light for voters to read. tabs in place.

Lines built up at some polling places, fueling Republican suspicions that some supporters were unable to cast their ballots, though there is no evidence that affected the outcome.

County officials say everyone was able to vote and all legal ballots were counted.

In the lawsuit filed Friday, Lake sued Maricopa County officials and Hobbs in her current role as Arizona secretary of state.

Sophia Solis, a spokeswoman for the secretary of state’s office, said Lake’s lawsuit was under review, but had no further comment on the filing.

Jason Berry, a Maricopa County spokesman, declined to comment on Lake’s request to throw out the county’s election results in the gubernatorial race.

But he said the county “respects the electoral contest process and looks forward to sharing data about the administration of the 2022 general election and our work to ensure that all legal voters have an opportunity to cast their ballot.”

Hobbs in a post on his Twitter account called the lawsuit “Lake’s last desperate attempt to undermine our democracy and nullify the will of the voters.”

Lake has refused to acknowledge that he lost to Hobbs by more than 17,000 votes.

Lake was one of the highest-profile Republican candidates in the midterms to come to terms with former President Donald Trump’s false claims of voter fraud in 2020.

Trump demanded on Truth Social in November that Lake be “installed Governor of Arizona,” calling the 2022 midterms “another criminal voting operation.”

He released a statement from his campaign manager that called the lawsuit a “sham” and said his camp remained focused on “preparing to go to work on the first day of Katie Hobbs’ administration.”

Lake’s lawsuit says Republicans were disproportionately affected by the troubles in Maricopa County because they outscored Democrats on Election Day 3-1. Republican leaders had urged their voters to wait until Election Day to vote.

In late November, Lake filed a public records lawsuit demanding that Maricopa County turn over election-related documents.

She was looking to identify voters who might have had trouble casting their ballots, such as people who registered at more than one polling place or those who returned a mail-in ballot and also registered at one polling place.

Over the summer, a federal judge also denied a request by Lake and Mark Finchem, the defeated Republican candidate for secretary of state, to require a manual count of all ballots during the November election.

Lake has pointed to problems with some ticket printers as the cause of the incorrect results. Pictured: A poll worker holds up a stack of counted ballots at the Maricopa County Recorder’s Office on November 10, 2022.

The judge has since sanctioned the attorneys representing Lake and Finchem, saying they “made false, misleading, and unsubstantiated factual assertions” in their lawsuit. The lawyers told the court that their claims were “legally sound and supported by solid evidence”.

Hobbs, in her role as secretary of state, asked a court to begin a statutorily required automatic statewide recount in three contests decided by less than half a percentage point.

The race for attorney general was one of the closest races in state history, with Democrat Kris Mayes beating Republican Abe Hamadeh by just 510 votes out of 2.5 million cast.

Races for superintendent of public instruction and a state legislature seat in suburban Phoenix will also be counted, but the margins are much larger.